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EC seeks India's help to bolster WTO

Ranvir Nayar in Paris

Despite the failure of the Seattle Ministerial Conference, the European Union will step up its efforts to bring other countries, including India, on board for yet another attempt at a broader World Trade Organisation round.

Senior EC officials told rediff.com recently in Brussels that the EC will begin consultations with key countries on whether the Seattle process could be rescued and revived. ``Yes, it will involve a shuttle diplomacy to various key capitals across the globe to test the temperatures there and to see whether a consensus can be found to relaunch the Seattle process as soon as possible. This time around, we would like everybody to be better prepared than we were at Seattle,'' Karl Friedrich Falkenberg, head of EC's trade negotiations unit told rediff.com in Brussels.

Falkenberg says most of the work will now be done at the WTO headquarters in Geneva, where the EC will be testing for support amongst its friends and trying to achieve a consensus for the broader round. The Europeans say that once a text or a draft declaration for launching the new round has been prepared by the officials in Geneva, it would then be up to a ministerial conference to launch the new round.

The Europeans say they are most optimistic about support from a number of countries in Latin America and Asia for launching the new round and don't expect India to be a hurdle as well. ``Even the Indian position at Seattle was very surprising. India took a fairly constructive position and that was encouraging,'' says Falkenberg.

The Europeans bid will face the first test in Geneva in early January when the executive committee of the WTO meets for the first time after the Seattle fiasco. That is bound to be followed by a fairly long session where the Europeans will assess the situation and think their future strategy through, before making any moves on the comprehensive round.

For almost a year before the Seattle Ministerial Conference, the Europeans had been the most vociferous supporters of a broad-based new round, termed the Millenium Round. And as the deadline approached, the EC upped the ante by holding bilateral and multilateral consultations with key countries across the globe, including developing countries like India.

The EC had all the time been insisting that instead of moving on an indefinitely stretched round focused simply on agriculture and services, the world community should go in for a time bound, but much broader round comprising almost all the issues that are crucial to the world trade today.

Falkenberg blames the failure of Seattle on a total lack of preparation and the adamant attitude taken by the Untied States. ``On the implementation issues, which were so crucial to the developing countries, the United States was extremely negative on key demands like TRIPS, TRIMS, textiles and dumping.

"Even on market access, we did have a text that was in the end possible, but the United States was fighting about reducing peak tariffs. We had twice reached a prior pact with the US to allow duty and quota free access to the least developed countries, but even that was scuttled by the US at the last moment. Throughout the entire conference, the US was constantly chipping away at anything that could have helped launch a new round at Seattle,'' says Falkenberg.

So this time around, the Europeans are being extremely cautious about the US. ``We will have to see if the political climate in the US will allow the Americans to take a more constructive attitude. If so, we can work out a rescue package for the new round. The main points are not unreasonable for the US and most importantly, the US President Bill Clinton may want to demonstrate some capacity to govern in his last year in the office,'' says Falkenberg.

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